Welfare

Book review

Book:

Poor Women's Lives: Gender, Work and Poverty in late-Victorian London

Andrew August
Associated University Presses: London, 1999

Reviewer:

Anna Davin

Middlesex University

This book is an excellent contribution to our historical
understanding of London, of gender and of labour markets. Andrew August
brings together the concerns of feminist historians of the last twenty-odd
years (in particular Ellen Ross in Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast
London, 1870-1918, OUP 1993) with issues raised in labour history,
especially by Gareth Stedman Jones (in Outcast London, OUP 1971
and 'Working-class Culture and Working-class Politics in London, 1870-1900',
in Languages of Class, CUP 1983). Deploying census and other statistical
material with skill and a minimum of fuss, he addresses the specificities
of local labour markets, demographies and households in the larger urban
context.

August chose for his study three London neighbourhoods:
Lisson Grove (Marylebone), Somers Town (Euston) and Globe Town (Bethnal
Green). Each shared similar levels of poverty according to Booth's map
of 1880s London; they had distinct boundaries, usually constituted by
railway, canal or main road; and for each the invaluably-detailed manuscript
books of the census enumerators were available. All were relatively long
established (as August shows from census data on place of birth), with
fewer migrants from other parts of England and fewer migrants from abroad
than in London as a whole. Globe Town had the highest London-born population
(88% as against 78.6 in Somers Town, 77% in Lisson Grove, and in London
overall 69.7%). Lisson Grove had the most Irish born (4.7%; while Somers
Town had 2.9%, Globe Town 0.6%; and London overall 2.1%). Inhabitants
not born in the UK were a tiny proportion (1.1% in Somers Town, 0.6% in
Lisson Grove, 0.8% in Globe Town; in London overall 2.8%).

August stresses both differences and similarities
between the neighbourhoods, examining how they developed as well as focusing
on the 1880s:

Each grew in response to particular market and geographic
forces, and different trades were concentrated in each. But the general
structures of the labour markets were quite similar, particularly in the
pervasiveness of casual and seasonal employment and the strict division
of labour by sex. Common patterns of household formation existed across
all three neighbourhoods. The dynamics of women's employment and of gender
relations within households reveal a common way of life in the neighbourhoods
and apparently throughout inner-London poor areas. In all of them, tremendous
burdens of work, powerfully restrictive gender ideologies, and crushing
poverty presented women with tremendous challenges, to which they responded
with energy and determination.

The larger comparative dimension is by contrast relatively
undeveloped. He admits this himself when touching on married women's work
in Bradford and the Potteries (drawing on Karl Ittman and Richard Whipp,
though not Jacqueline Sarsby); however in his use of work by Elizabeth
Roberts and Carl Chinn, on Lancashire and Birmingham, respectively, the
sense of local specificity is outweighed at times by the search for common
patterns.

August is clearly aware of the limitations of census
data - its snapshot character, for instance, which means that the enumeration,
always in April, under-represent summer and winter work while intermittent
and casual employment is easily missed. He notes the under-reporting of
women's paid work where male heads of household were ignorant of it, or
did not want it known that their wives worked, or did not think it would
'count'; the exclusion of domestic labour and the invisibility of prostitution,
begging and theft. Nevertheless, sensitive to such problems and using
the data with care, he succeeds in drawing out convincing patterns of
employment and of household formation in his three neighbourhoods.

To interpret this formidable quantitative data he
turns to more qualitative material - the evidence of witnesses to parliamentary
commissions; memoirs; newspaper reports and so on - and to the work of
other social historians. Stressing the importance of understanding the
'life-course' (or life-cycle) of women in relation to their employment,
August adapts the categorisation of households used by Lynn Lees (Exiles
of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London, Cornell UP 1979). He
designates seven family types, correlating age of wife with number of
resident offspring and whether they are employed: wife under 45, no offspring
(type 1), 1 child less than a year old (type 2), offspring at home none
employed (type 3), offspring at home fewer than half employed (type 4),
offspring at home more than half employed (type 5); wife 45 or over, no
offspring or only one over 20 at home (type 6), and wife 65 or over (type
7). Analysis of the computerised census data on household and employment
according to these categories then allows him to argue, in dialogue with
his predecessors, that married women did not turn to paid work because
of crises in the domestic budget. Though their need for money was greatest
when they had young children, this was when they were least likely to
be employed, not most.

Though it is impossible to know exactly what these
women thought, their behaviour reflects a culture of female work in these
neighbourhoods. Women simply expected to work hard throughout their lives.
When it was possible, given their domestic responsibilities, this work
would be in paid employment, and their wages certainly formed a welcome
addition to the household budget.

At other times the economic value of their domestic
labour, or its indispensability, overrode the usefulness of any earnings.
In each of his neighbourhoods the percentage of wives employed according
to the 1881 census declined with the first child (household type 2): from
29.5% to 13.2% in Somers Town, 32% to only 31.3% in Lisson Grove, and
27% to 17% in Globe Town. The figures for household type 3, with children
not employed, are 12.1%, 19.4% and 15.4%. Over the next stages, as children
began to bring in a wage then leave, rates rise again, to fall away once
more after age 65. This general pattern holds in all three neighbourhoods,
though in Lisson Grove, where more service work was available, employment
rates were higher at all ages and especially for household type 3. It
seems that there older married women earned wages while their daughters
took over at home.

Another historical argument tackled by August is
the question of women's relative power in household and neighbourhood.
Did controlling the household budget mean, as Carl Chinn has argued, that
married women escaped their apparent subordination? While agreeing that
women's neighbourhood networks and mutual support meant that they were
not helpless victims of their menfolk, August is clear that the cultural
expectations of gendered behaviour and relationships worked to women's
great disadvantage. Their authority 'chiefly operated in a network of
women and children'. They themselves upheld 'powerful gender roles that
required self-sacrifice and mutuality on the part of poor women', At the
same time women faced an economic system which kept and exploited them
as labour so cheap that their earnings had always to be supplemented by
men - husbands, fathers, brothers or sons.

Andrew August has produced a book which though brief
rests on an immense amount of work, lightly borne. Though complex it is
well organised. Each chapter is broken up into sections and subsections
(twice however the headings are confusingly in the wrong fount - pp. 88
and 92), and concludes with a useful summary. There is a detailed breakdown
of the kinds of work done by women in the three neighbourhoods, with in
each case a good sense of the larger chronological and labour context
and neither too little detail nor too much. Issues of birth rate, life-cycle,
migration, household and employment are all held in balance. Perhaps it
would have been interesting to know more about other kinds of difference.
In Lisson Grove, for instance, with its Irish-born population and no doubt
also London-born who identified as Irish, is there any discernible effect
on ages of marriage, or fertility patterns, or employment? Globe Town
was at this point still very English. In other East End neighbourhoods,
especially in Stepney and Whitechapel, Jewish immigration was growing
- what were the consequences in terms of gender, household and employment?

The urge to ask for Andrew August's close analysis
to be extended still further demonstrates the interest of this book -
its approach is so fruitful that in the end one wants more. It provides
a heartening demonstration that the qualitative research of recent years
can be reinforced and extended by quantitative research, that numerical
data need not be narrow, oversimplifying and dry, and that there is always
more to be discovered. It should be widely read by all those interested
in women's history, social history, historical geography, labour history,
and the kind of London history which brings in all such approaches.